Error diffusion is a major component in modern print and copy image path to render continuous tone image to halftone images. The computational cost of error diffusion is potentially a bottleneck of overall system throughput. Therefore, acceleration techniques for error diffusion are of considerable interest.
Some acceleration techniques have been created, but cause artifacts at boundaries of each image block. Other approaches rely on a wave-front scheduling to avoid artifacts, but have high implementation complexity. These approaches provide the same image quality as an un-accelerated error diffusion implementation, but at a high computational cost.